The Zemstvo argument by the river

By the river Koznyshev presses his brother about the Zemstvo: money is spent on salaries, and there are no schools, no medical assistance, no midwives. Levin, watching a black shape in the cornfield that turns out to be his steward, answers that he has tried and can do nothing. Cornered, he blurts out the real ground of his indifference — why should he trouble about medical centres he would never use or schools he would never send his children to? He argues that the motive power of all action is personal happiness, that he would defend to the last any right that touches him, and that disposing of forty thousand roubles of Zemstvo money or trying the idiot Aleshka for horse-stealing touches him not at all; then he impersonates the judge and the prisoner. The Zemstvo institutions, he says, are birches cut for Whitsuntide and stuck up to imitate woods that grew naturally in Europe. Koznyshev corrects the image, wins on philosophy and history, and calls it a temporary error. Levin is beaten and unconvinced.

Tolstoy stages an argument in which the loser is nearer the truth, and makes the asymmetry structural: Koznyshev holds a position, Levin keeps shifting ground because he is thinking as he speaks. The cut birches are the novel's image for imported institutions. Levin's admission that education is good, offered unguardedly, is the exact point at which he is beaten.